Shortcut-S Photoshop Keyboard: Optimus Primus

Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards are elegantly customizable, but they’re very expensive and may not have enough keys for your needs. If you’re an avid user of Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere, AutoCAD and other programs that have a ton of commands, check out the Shortcut-S keyboard.

Shortcut is a large USB keyboard, measuring about 16″ long and 12″ wide, but at least it’s only 0.3″ thick. It has a total of 319 keys: 299 of the keys will be mapped to specific commands as determined by Shortcut-S Sistem-S – the company who developed the keyboard – while the remaining 20 keys will be yours to customize.

The keyboard’s overlay in the images above and in the video below is specifically for Photoshop, but Shortcut S Sistem promises that they will release more overlays and software profiles for other programs.

Comments (3):

I’m a professional designer for 5 years and has been using photosop, illustrator, indesign and etc. on daily bases. To be honest, I don’t find this product beneficial. This is just my personal opinion. Here’s the reason:

When I work, my left hand is on the key board all the time and I remember all the shortcuts I use the most. I almost don’t need to see the key board at all. If I switch to this keyboard, I would have to look for the keys every single time. Even if I can memorize what area the keys are, it still takes a bit more time to make sure I press the right key since there are SO MANY of them. I honestly think it would slow me down instead of making it easier. This might be for other designers, not for me. Sorry!

I get what you’re saying. Perhaps beginners or casual users will get more mileage out of the keyboard, precisely because they don’t have any habits or muscle memory to unlearn.

Another thing that I’m just now realizing about the Shortcut-S is that it doesn’t seem to have keys for letters, which you’ll still need even if it’s just to save files or name layers. If that’s indeed the case, then you’ll still need to keep an ordinary keyboard around.